Re: creating templates for page fragments?

Hi David,

there are serveral approaches to your problem, which we have too.

1. the one you are describing, combining the fragments at runtime (disadvantage is that 
you have to code that in your app for each wifget, and the fragements by themselves are 
more difficult to develop because to view the hole page you need to run the application)

2. use the Server side include functionality of XMLC, which I actually never used so I 
just can point you to the manual.

3. (my favorite) For static HTML the HTML designer have a mechanism in place to deal with 
these snippets already (some use ASP tags inside their snippets, and when they want to 
deploy the site, they generate every page). The thing I like about XMLC is that the HTML 
designer can work as if it was an static HTML. Many tools (for HTML designers) already 
have these kind of functionality, they can just use that. So they have a set of fragments 
and produce the whole site as if it was static, then XMLC compiles those pages.

4. (for compeletness) In actual projects it happens, that the HTML is redundantly 
maintained. :-(

If someone else has a diferent method, please pitch in...

Arno

David Michaels wrote:
> It could be argued that (in some cases) XMLC requires more effort vs. 
> writing classes to render commonly used UI elements.  For instance, if 
> the same exact list widget appears on a dozen pages, the XMLC approach 
> would require the UI designer to mockup that same list on each page in 
> which it will appear.
>
>  
>
> Perhaps I could mockup commonly-used UI components in their own HTML 
> “fragment” pages, compile them via XMLC, and create the page at runtime 
> consisting of multiple XMLC page objects.  
>
>
> Anyone have thoughts on doing this?  Is it straightforward to call 
> multiple writeDOM() methods in sequence to build the final page?
>
>  
>
> Thanks!
>
>  
>
> --
>
> David Michaels <dkm@xxxxxxx <mailto:dkm@xxxxxxx>>
>
> Director of Web Engineering
>
> PGP Corporation (650) 319-9009
>
>